Texas Governor Rick Perry has been running around the country talking up his "Texas miracle" of economic glory. He has spent much of his time attacking California and trying to lure companies to move. Before they go, they may want to check not just the temperatures, which have been boiling, but also the air and water quality reports. Oh, and perhaps review the labor market in Texas.

In Capitol Weekly today, Lucas examines the "facts" that Perry is spewing. To put it mildly, there is another side of the story. Perry is benefitting from smart progressive policies, like a limit foe home equity loans to 80% of value and a tax on every barrel of oil that comes out of the ground. You know, the oil extraction tax that Repulicans have been fighting desperately when it is brought up here.

And then there is thet dirty side of the economic "boom" that Perry won't tell you about:

But Texas also leads the nation in dirtiest air, amount of toxic chemicals released into the water and hazardous waste generated, according to statistics from various sources compiled in Texas on the Brink, a publication of the Texas House of Representatives Legislative Study Group.

Texas also has the nation's highest percentage of minimum wage jobs and the lowest percentage of residents with a high school diploma in the country. Of adult Texans, nearly 32 percent are college graduates - almost 38 percent of Californians are.

Almost 30 percent of Texans are uninsured - more than 6 million persons of whom 60 percent are Hispanic.? Texas also has the highest percentage of uninsured children in the country.

In Texas, 17.2 percent of the population lives in poverty compared to 13.2 percent in California where the median income is $59,000 versus $48,000 in Texas.

I grew up in Texas, and I go back frequently. There are some great things about Texas. Because of the foresight of early leaders in retaining mineral rights to the state, I received and excellent education at a great value. But the Tea Party extremists run rampant, and the environment is still seen as something for corporate plunder.

There are a lot of Republicans, and even a few Democrats, who think we should follow the Texas model. But all that glitters, well, it isn't always gold. Sometimes it is just a bunch of oil in the ground and the fog of dirty air and water.

Once upon a time, there was quackery. It was the term used to refer to medical practices that were not supported by evidence and were ineffective and potentially harmful. Physicians understood that modalities such as homeopathy, reflexology, and various "energy healing" (i.e., faith healing) methodologies were based either on prescientific vitalism or on science that was at best incorrect or grossly distorted. More importantly, they weren't afraid to say so.

Whether you’re a motion designer, front-end developer or economy student – you have to keep up with the times and constantly increase your knowledge and broaden your professional viewpoint. One of the best ways to do that is by watching videos from professionals and experts in your field. Videos don’t have to be strictly instructive. A good and gripping video can inspire you for the rest of the day. In this article you’ll find a compilation of 40 awesome, inspiring and valuable videos varying from entrepreneurship to web design and self-motivation which will help you to develop new skills, gain a bunch of inspiration and simply look at things from a different perspective.

This is an educational video by Mike Michalowicz of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. In this video you will learn why now (in a down economy) is the best time to start a new business, or to grow the one you already have.

Design

Sagres is Portugal’s leading beer brand. This year, Sagres brewed a new product: Sagres Preta Chocolate, a chocolate flavored stout beer. Their agency’s creative team believed that if Sagres made a chocolate beer, the perfect way to launch it was also to create a website made of chocolate.

Resonance is the vision of SR Partners; a collaborative project with over 30 independent visual and audio designers/studios. The aim was to explore the relationship between geometry and audio in unique ways.

Typographer, graphic designer and businessman Erik Spiekermann has created timeless, influential and, yes, Meta-physical work over the past three decades. Listen to the design genius talk about new visual languages, design processes, the analogies of music and typography, and why we need better client culture in this latest Gestalten.tv video and you will easily realize why.

Vote For Hope” was written to encourage and inspire the hip hop generation—and everyone—to get involved, and contribute their time, energy, creativity, and other resources to be the change they want to see in the world.

HTML5 Boilerplate is a “rock-solid default for HTML5 awesome.” In this video, Paul Irish, the man behind the project will show you how you can use HTML5 Boilerplate to get your projects up and running quickly while keeping best practices covered.

Miscellaneous

Growth is not for everyone. Neither is success. The SSHO (Student Hip-Hop Organization) decided to ask some of their favorite artists in hip hop culture, legends and up and corners alike, about their experiences with both.

This documentary is about Jason Paul, a free runner that tries to find new ways in his daily life to fulfill his inner needs. On his journey to London he discovers that friendship and companion are essential values in life.

Are schools designed to help people learn? Are colleges and universities really institutions of higher education? Do students actually learn any science in science classes? Can skateboarding give us a better model for teaching and learning? Watch this video to find out.

This talk will examine our ability to affect change at the intersection of experience, behavior, meaning, and culture, and will emphasize our responsibility to approach our work with philanthropic enthusiasm that would make Carnegie proud.

The element is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. When people arrive at the element, they feel most themselves and most inspired and achieve at their highest levels. With a wry sense of humor, Ken Robinson looks at the conditions that enable us to find ourselves in the element and those that stifle that possibility.

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that well be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

We've come a long way since Google first started taking about launching a fiber-based ISP -- from beta tests, to hopeful communities, to Topeka fools day, to selecting not one, but two Kansas Cities. Now, it's "boots on the ground," time according to the Google Fiber blog: detail engineering starts now. In the coming weeks, Kansas City residents (presumably on both sides of the Kansas / Missouri border) can expect to see El Goog's engineers measuring phone poles, gathering geographical data, and asking hard-hitting questions, like "What is your address?" All this footwork will help Google get a head start on building that sweet, ultra-high-speed gigabit network. Not the most glamorous bit of Google magic we've ever seen, but it's still exciting to hear that preliminary work has begun. Of course, it would be even more exciting if this were coming where we lived.

The conservative American Action Network is launching a large-scale mail and newspaper ad campaign, targeting a long list of House districts to shore up Republicans on the issue of Medicare.

The campaign, which includes both mail pieces and newspaper ads, charges Democrats with attempting to “balance the budget on the backs of seniors” with a proposal to amend Medicare Part D.

All told, the AAN message offensive will cost about a million dollars, according to officials with the group, and also includes some web advertising. That’s a significant investment in the Medicare debate, which Democrats have dominated so far this year.

The issue has to do with forcing drug manufacturers to pay Medicaid-style rebates for drugs needed by those covered by both Medicaid and Medicare Part D, making yet another needed good government fix to the massive fuckup that was George W. Bush's signature budget-busting healthcare item.

Keep in mind that the context for the debt ceiling hostage negotiation is the desperate need for Republicans to distract and take the stench away from their deeply unpopular vote for the Ryan budget. They need to dirty the water on this issue as much as possible, particularly since seniors are their key voting demographic, and because their success in 2010 was largely predicated on lying to seniors that the Affordable Care Act would end Medicare as we know it. The Affordable Care Act was a deeply flawed bill that did a lot of things wrong, but hurting Medicare was not one of them. Nor will Waxman's bill that is currently being attacked hurt Medicare, either.

But that's not going to stop conservative groups from lying about it, because they know they stand a good chance of losing the House if Dems can make a strong counterattack on protecting Medicare. The GOP already had a casualty of the Ryan budget earlier this year in New York's 26th district.

The GOP urgently needs Dems to take votes to cut Medicare so that they can negate the issue of their arrogant vote on the Ryan budget heading into 2012.

Good thing, then, that the White House has been pushing for cuts to...Medicare. Makes sense. That should work out fabulously.

Every now and again, the mask slips and we see what the neocon scion really cares about. Fiscal responsibility? Debt reduction? This was a man who barely mentioned the debt or spending under the fiscally ruinous Bush-Cheney years, and mocked those who did. And the reason is simple: this is a writer concerned solely about partisanship and power...

They can't even bother to disguise their rank cynicism and partisan tribalism any more. Their core objective in this Congress: what Mitch McConnell said.

Translation:How much nicer everything was back when Kristol would at least put on a wig and some Sinatra before I gave him his Brotherhood of St. Reagan reacharounds.

The time has come in the debt-limit fight for all Americans to declare their loyalties: Are you with the bank robbers, or are you with the dirty old men?

This unpalatable choice is as good a way as any to frame the debate in these last days before the default deadline.On one side are House Republican leaders who, facing a rebellion of Tea Party conservatives, appealed for party unity by screening for members a clip of the 2010 film “The Town,” in which Ben Affleck’s bank-robber character tells the Jeremy Renner character: “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.” Renner replies: “Whose car we takin’?” The clip ended before the shooting and beatings that followed.

On the other side are House Democratic leaders, who had to decide how to handle Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.), accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward a teenage girl (he claims it was consensual). Wu, who previously attracted attention by sending staff members photos of himself in a tiger costume,had no choice but to resign. But leaders accepted his plan to stay on the job for the debt standoff, thereby giving them one more vote against Speaker John Boehner’s debt plan.

It’s hard to decide which wins the craven crown: Exhorting colleagues by playing for them a call to criminal violence? Or trying to thwart the opposition by tolerating a 56-year-old colleague accused of forcing himself on a friend’s daughter?

On one side, an entire caucus watching a film about violent thieves going to "hurt some people" for inspiration. On the other, a political party with one Congressman involved in a sex scandal, temporarily holding off a resignation while we deal with an important vote (trumped up) fiscal crisis.

Milbank gets a two-fer here: claim that Democrats, who are overwhelmingly favored by women at the ballot box and passed the Ledbetter Act in the face of conservative opposition, are somehow the party of dirty old man misogynists, and claim that a sex scandal involving one Congressman that may or may not rise to the level of criminal activity is somehow on a par with an entire political party holding America hostage and fetishizing criminal violence while promising to "hurt some people."

Of course, Milbank is considered one of the "liberal" columnists at the Post.

The American press establishment isn't just dead weight in failing to expose the corporate takeover of the country's politics and the sheer lunacy of its right-wing flank. As with the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, it is playing an actively complicit, damaging role in our democracy. The entire industry might as well shrivel up and die for all the good it does in informing the public.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said today that some members of his own caucus who are refusing to agree to a compromise debt ceiling deal are hoping to unleash “chaos” and thus force the White House and Senate Democrats to make bigger concessions than they’re already offering. As many as 40 House Republicans, especially Tea Party members and freshmen, have demanded nothing short of changing the Constitution to include a balanced budget amendment before they would vote to raise debt ceiling, even though that has zero chance before the U.S. faces potential default on Aug. 2.

Speaking on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show this morning, Boehner agreed that failing to raise the limit before the deadline would be devastating, and said the “chaos” plan won’t work when asked by Ingraham what’s motivating the recalcitrant Republicans:

BOEHNER: Well, first they want more. And my goodness, I want more too. And secondly, a lot of them believe that if we get past August the second and we have enough chaos, we could force the Senate and the White House to accept a balanced budget amendment. I’m not sure that that — I don’t think that that strategy works. Because I think the closer we get to August the second, frankly, the less leverage we have vis a vis our colleagues in the Senate and the White House.

These folks aren't in the business of doing Wall Street's bidding. They're in the business of bringing the system down to create their own new order, no different from a Maoist or Leninist revolutionary on the other side of the aisle. It's a market fundamentalist cult. They are a sizable and growing minority of the Republican caucus, and the ones who don't toe their line are terrified their heads will be the next to fall before the Tea Party guillotine.

Digby wondered earlier whether the Tea Party were more political construct or real grassroots movement. I guess the best answer is that it doesn't really matter. The Tea Party has always been fear-based mobilization of the ignorant on whatever issue Rove, DeMint, Limbaugh, the Kochs, etc. wanted it to be about. It doesn't have to be grassroots movement for rank and file Republicans to fear a primary challenge if they step at all out of line.

As much as there has been "good cop, bad cop" bipartisanship played over austerity (and there has been), there can be no doubt that the GOP is transforming from a corporatist entity slowly hollowing out America's middle class, to a truly malignant revolutionary entity.

With Julia spending the summer and most of the fall in The Republic of Georgia, I've been thinking about various political and historical aspects of that country, and one of the things that is claimed to be true is that wine was first invented there. Recently, someone asked me (always ask the archaeologist esoteric stuff like this) where wine was first invented. And, recently, we scored some Concord Grapes, which are native to North America (presumably thanks to some bird a long time ago) as opposed to most grapes, and which provide the roots for most (nearly all?) wine grape stock. And, a paper on the genetics of wine came out recently and has been staring at me for a few weeks now. All these things together made me want to update my current knowledge of the origin of wine.